(Photo: CHristians pray during an anti-North Korea and pro-U.S. protest in Seoul, 3 Oct 2007/Han Jae-Ho)

The United States sees a mixed picture on world religious freedom, with progress in interfaith dialogue weighed against government repression and sectarian strife in many countries.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday unveiled the latest State Department report on global religious freedom, which particularly criticized Iran and North Korea among other countries for harsh limits on religious expression.

“It is our hope that the … report will encourage existing religious freedom movements around the world,” Clinton said, adding that all people should have the right to believe or not as they see fit.

The report tagged North Korea, Iran, Myanmar, China, Sudan, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan among the worst offenders, placing them on a watch list put out earlier this year.

Michael Posner, the State Department’s top official for democracy and human rights, said President Barack Obama’s call this year for a new beginning between the United States and Muslims did not mean sidelining religious liberty. “Religious freedom is a fundamental right, a social good, a source of stability, and a key to international security,” Posner said in the introduction to the report.

Posner praised interfaith dialogue efforts promoted by Jordan, Spain and other countries. But religious repression and discrimination remained huge problems worldwide.

Clinton said she opposed efforts promoted by some Islamic countries to establish a global benchmark for what constitutes “defamation of a religion,” saying it could be an unacceptable intrusion on free speech rights. “The protection of speech about religion is particularly important since persons of different faith will inevitably hold divergent views on religious questions,” she said.

Read our news story here.

Here is our Factbox summarising the main findings.

For the full International Religious Freedom Report, with links to each country section, click here.

For the full text of Clinton’s remarks, click here.

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The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life just released a demographic study of the Muslim world it says is “the largest project of its kind to date.” Click here http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=450 to see the report ”Mapping the Global Muslim Population: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Muslim Population.”

The report drew on data from 232 countries and territories and involved Pew researchers working with nearly 50 demographers and social scientists around the world. It is certainly a useful reference for anyone interested in the Islamic world.

(PHOTO: Hundreds of thousands of Muslims pray inside the Grand Mosque in Mecca Sept. 15, 2009. REUTERS/Susan Baahil)

Among its highlights:

- There are 1.57 billion Muslims of all ages in the world today, about 23 percent of the global population of 6.8 billion. (By contrast, various estimates put the number of Christians worldwide at about two billion).

- Over 60 percent of Muslims live in Asia and one-fifth in the Middle East and North Africa.

-  More than 300 million Muslims, or one-fifth of their global population, live in countries where Islam is not the majority religion. Muslims are a minority in India but it has the third-largest Muslim population (161 million).

- Sub-Saharan Africa has about 15 percent of the Muslim population, and Pew estimates that Muslims are a slight majority in Nigeria at 50.4 percent of the population.

- Ten to 13 percent of Muslims are estimated to be Shias and most Shias live in just four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq. Sunnis account for 87 to 90 percent of the Muslim population.

- In Europe, there are an estimated 38.1 million Muslims.

German politicians have woken up to the potential fallout from the bloody killing in a Dresden courtroom of a 31-year-old Egyptian mother which has unleashed anger in the Islamic world.

It took Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has talked much about boosting the integration of Germany’s roughly 3.5 million Muslims, several days to condemn the killing, perpetrated by a German of Russian origin suspected of being a neo-Nazi.

Suddenly, the government is trying to soothe tensions to avert a potential storm similar to the violence which erupted over Denmark’s publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. And less than three-months before an election, politicians are also worried about security — intelligence services say Germany is already a target due to its deployment of troops in Afghanistan.

(Photo: Memorial gathering in Dresden - sign says “Racism kills,” 11 July 2009/Fabrizio Bensch)

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said the U.N. should condemn Germany for the killing. Last week, hundreds of mourners in Alexandria, Egypt, protested at the funeral of the slain woman, Marwa El-Sherbiny. Egyptian media have made much of the incident and some Egyptians have even called for a boycott of German products.

“Germany has no room for xenophobia or Islamophobia,” Merkel’s spokesman told reporters when pressed on the subject at a news conference, adding political failings had not led to the killing. Some politicians attended a memorial ceremony for the victim at the weekend.

However, the tragedy has raised questions — about the police, as well as politicians’, response.

The July 1 killing took place in a court where Marwa El-Sherbiny, pregnant and a mother of a three-year-old, was testifying against the attacker. He was appealing his conviction for insulting her by calling her an “Islamist”, “terrorist” and “slut” when she asked him to make room for her son to play on swings in a playground.

The killer not only stabbed her 18 times but also stabbed her husband. To make matters worse, police officers shot the husband, mistaking him for the attacker. He was in a coma for several days.

(Photo: Karachi protest against murder, 10 July 2009/Athar Hussain)

When Merkel fails to respond quickly to hate-crimes like this one, or woos her largely Catholic Christian Democrats (CDU) by saying that mosque minarets should be no taller than church steeples, she risks undoing some of the goodwill she has fostered with her official dialogue with Germany’s Muslim community.

Some groups, including the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, say Islamophobia has long been a phenomenon and want Merkel to describe the killing as a “brutal, racist, Islamophobic murder”.

Even the German media is only starting to link the attack to xenophobic attitudes.

Could this incident unleash an outburst of violence? And to what extent do you think Germans are conditioned to accept a degree of Islamophobia?

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(Photo:A burqa-clad woman in Kabul’s old bazaar, 4 March 2009/Ahmad Masood)

Here’s some news for Nicolas Sarkozy. While the French president has begun a battle against the burqa in France, the famous blue garment that covers women from head to toe is losing favour back in its stronghold Afghanistan. In Herat, burqa seller Nehmatullah Yusefy says sales have dropped 50 percent since the Taliban were toppled in 2001 and he says he will soon need to start stocking other styles of Islamic dress to make up for lost profits.

(Photo right: Baghdad woman in chador, 12 Nov 2008/Mahmoud Raouf)

“I think, God willing, the sales of burqas will decrease, then I will sell chador namaz and even maybe mantau chalvar,” Yusefy said, standing behind the counter of his small outlet on a strip of burqa shops in the western city’s main market.

Read my feature here.

The chador namaz is a long, billowing dress in black or sombre-patterned fabric which is widely worn in Iran. It exposes the woman’s face but covers the rest of her head and body until her ankles.

Mantau chalvar is a long coat worn over trousers and it is popular with women in the capital Kabul, who are comparatively more free to dress as they choose. It is always worn with a scarf covering the head that is tied firmly under the chin.

(Photo left: Kabul woman in mantau chalvar, 28 June 2009/Ahmad Masood)

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Amid the glum news from Afghanistan, Golnar Motevalli of our Kabul bureau has sent this from Herat:

“Behind a parade of old mud brick shops, through narrow winding alleys, a tiny door opens onto a sundrenched courtyard, where school children giggle and play alongside the ghosts of Afghanistan’s Jewish past.

The Yu Aw is one of four synagogues in the old quarter of Herat city in west Afghanistan, which after decades of abandonment and neglect, has been restored to provide desperately-needed space for an infant school.”

(Photo: Afghan children study in Yu Aw synagogue in Herat, 8 June 2009/Mohammad Shoiab)

The restoration work has been done by the Agha Khan Trust for Culture. The city’s three other former synagogues are also being restored. Read the feature here.

Afghanistan’s Jewish community, once said to have numbered 40,000 or more, now consists of just one person, Zebolan Simanto. He receives a care package from New York every spring with matzos, grape juice and oil to conduct the Seder, the meal on the first evening of Passover.

(Photo: Zebolan Simanto in Kabul, 26 Jan 2005/Ahmad Masood)

There’s a legend in Afghanistan that the Pashtun, the country’s largest ethnic group, actually descended from one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. In this legend, the capital’s name Kabul comes from “Cain and Abel” and many Pashtun tribe names had Jewish roots, as in Afridi (Ephraim), Yusufzai (Joseph) and Shinwari (Shimon). After the Taliban were overthrown in November 2001, this legend was mentioned so often on Jewish-interest websites that I looked into it during a reporting tour in Kabul in early 2002. After much asking around, I finally tracked down Abdul Shukoor Rishad, the doyen of Afghan historians, at his home in the dusty suburb of Khairkhana.

Rishad, who was 80 at the time, burst into a very un-Afghan fit of exasperation when I explained through an interpreter that I wanted to know about the legend of Jewish origins. Foreigners had been asking him this for decades, he complained, and he always told them there was nothing to the story. He said some of the Jews sent into captivity in Babylon were settled in present-day Iran. But he rejected claims that some then moved from there into parts of present-day Afghanistan.

Rishad was so convinced the legend had no basis in fact that he once turned down a large grant to research it further. “There is an association in California that is searching for the Lost Tribes,” he said. “When I was there in 1995, they were ready to provide me enough money for a new study. I turned it down because the theory is wrong. Afghans are not Jewish.”

Olaf Caroe, the British author of the authoritative history The Pathans (1958), called the legend “all great fun” but too riddled with inconsistencies to be true.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered a major address today on the election there. It was in the form of a khutbah, an Islamic Friday sermon that is often the platform for the most important public pronouncements in the Islamic Republic. So one might assume it would be couched in Islamic terminology and religious themes.

But a rough-and-ready indicator, a web “cloud” that indicates the frequency of certain words, tells us otherwise. Aziz Poonawalla over at the City of Brass blog generated a Khamenei khutbah cloud on Wordle on the basis of a quick translation of the ayatollah’s speech. I had some trouble reading all the terms, so I went to that site and generated one myself. Here is the result:

To be absolutely clear — this cloud is only a rough computer analysis. I generated it in Paris hours after the speech, without consulting any other Reuters bureau, so it played no part in our Tehran reporting of Khamenei’s comments or other coverage on our wire from Beirut and from London. Nothing can replace on-the-spot reporting by Persian-speaking correspondents who understand all the nuances in a political sermon like this.

That said, my techie side still thinks this cloud does highlight some interesting aspects of the sermon. The most frequently used words — people, election, state, president, revolution, country, leaders, legal — are political terms. Islamic makes a good showing, but it is only one of the top dozen or so terms — including God , which came up nine times — after the clear front-runner people (56 times).

Koran doesn’t appear at all.

When President Barack Obama delivers his long-awaited speech in Cairo on Thursday, will he address the Muslim world or the Arab world? In the pre-speech build-up, it’s being called a speech “to the Muslim world” or “to the world’s 1.x billion Muslims” (the estimated total mentioned in different articles fluctuates between 1and 1.5 billion). But the venue he’s chosen — Cairo — and all the focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict make it sound like a speech to and about the Middle East.

(Photo: President Barack Obama, 21 May 2009/Kevin Lamarque)

The Middle East is the heartland of Islam, but Arabs make up only about 20 percent of the world’s Muslims. Not all Arabs are Muslims. And non-Arab Iran is a major part of the Middle Eastern political scene. So is it correct to call this a speech to the Muslim world? Would it be better to call it a speech to the Middle East?

There is such an important overlap between the Arab and the Muslim worlds that it is hard to disentangle them. The Palestinian issue concerns Muslims around the world, but with varying intensity depending partly on whether it figures in regional politics or stands as a more distant symbol of oppression against Muslims. Politics can also poison Muslim relations with Jews, which can range from bitter enmity to interfaith cooperation depending on where, when and how one looks. The U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq may be justified in Washington as operations against international terrorism, but in Muslim countries they are often seen as attacks on Muslims and Islam.

When this speech was first announced as an address to the Muslim world, I blogged here and here that he should deliver it in Turkey or Indonesia because they were doing more to reconcile Islam and modern democracy than any Arab state. “As a politician from a country where church-state relations are a lively issue, one could expect him to ask what message his choice will send concerning the political relationship with religion in the state he chooses,” I wrote.

(Photo: Cairo at dusk, 14 April 2009/Tarek Mostafa)

The pressing question of how Islam relates to politics and society in the 21st century has an important religious component, because any adaptation or development would have to come from within a tradition that looks to religious authority to bless important changes. A speech addressing this would necessarily have to deal with religion, which is after all what Muslim countries have in common regardless of their geography, ethnicity, languages, traditions or politics.

Articles looking ahead to the speech focus mostly on the political, i.e. the Middle East peace process. Reuters has run a long curtainraiser today entitled “Obama to address tough issues in speech to Muslims” that touches on the Middle East, oil and international terrorism (BTW “speech to Muslims” is a neat way to get around the problem under discussion here). Washington also ran “Q+A: Why is Obama speech to Muslim world important?” and an earlier analysis on May 31 entitled “PREVIEW-Obama speech to Muslims key to new U.S. strategy.” That analysis mixed the Middle East and the wider Muslim world, saying “President Barack Obama will try to repair America’s tarnished image in the Muslim world on Thursday, as he looks to mobilize support for restarting Middle East peacemaking and thwarting Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”

Another article by our Middle East Special Correspondent Alistair Lyon, “Muslims want more than fine talk from Obama,” shows how complex all this is. Surveying opinion across the Muslim world, he found the Palestinian issue stood out as their main concern. But wider issues also emerged, for example a general desire to feel the U.S. president respects Muslims and Islam — a message Obama has already been sending. As for the venue, it seems that Arabs found the choice of Cairo very appropriate while a Malaysian and an Iranian Lyon quoted thought it was a bad choice.

(Photo: Fireworks at Malaysia’s Putra Mosque near Kuala Lumpur, 31 Aug 2003/Bazuki Muhammad)

In one of its pre-speech articles, the New York Times wrote that “when President Obama delivers a much-anticipated speech in Cairo, he will be addressing so many audiences, and seeking to advance so many agendas, that even his oratorical gifts are likely to be taxed.”

How do you think Obama should pitch his speech? Is it possible to juggle both the immediate political concerns of the Middle East with wider issues concerning the whole Muslim world? Or is it impossible not to?

Missy Ryan in our Baghdad bureau sees a possible drop in support for religious parties in Iraq:

BAGHDAD - When Iraqis last voted in 2005, some in Washington feared the mainly Muslim nation would veer in the direction of Iran, an Islamic theocracy, instead of becoming the moderate democracy they envisioned for post-Saddam Iraq.

The question when Iraqis elect new provincial leaders on January 31 will be whether the religious parties that have dominated politics since then can hang on to power despite a bitterness felt by voters starved of services and security.

“Religious parties didn’t keep their promises. They exploited our problems,” said Safaa Kadhim, a teacher in Basra, reflecting anger voiced across Iraq toward the major parties, mostly founded along sectarian lines and seen by many as corrupt and self-serving…

In an opinion poll by the government’s National Media Center in November, 68 percent of those questioned rejected the use of religious appeals in the campaign and 42 percent said they favored secular parties, while 31 percent supported religious parties.

Read the full story here.

(Photo: Election campaign posters in Baghdad’s Sadr City, 13 Jan, 2009/Kahtan al-Mesiary)

A rabbi, a Mennonite and a Zoroastrian priest were having dinner with the president of Iran — sounds like the start of a joke, but it happened in New York this week.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had dinner with around 200 people of various faiths including Mennonites, Quakers, United Methodists, Jews and Zoroastrians who said they wanted to promote peace by meeting such a prominent foe of the United States.  You can read our story about the meeting here.

Those who attended the Iftar meal in a Manhattan hotel ballroom had to brave a line of protesters outside who accused them of sitting down with a man little better than Hitler. Major Jewish groups had urged the cancellation of the event.

It was billed as a panel discussion titled: “What does my faith tradition bring to the struggle to eliminate poverty, injustice, global warming and war?”

Speakers included U.N. General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, who is a Catholic priest, and former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell-Magne Bondevik, who is a Lutheran, as well as Ahmadinejad.

“I stand here today, even when many of my co-religionists are dismissing, demeaning or boycotting this important conversation,” Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb said in her speech, arguing that it was her obligation to engage in dialogue in order to seek peace.

Arli Klassen, executive director of the Mennonite Central Committee, said she welcomed the presence of the protesters outside. “I respect their right to have their opinion. It’s especially important where we’re talking to a country where these rights (to protest) are not met in the same way,” she told Reuters.

“I respectfully disagree (with them) because I believe it’s important to dialogue, especially when there are differences,” she said. “The consequences of not dialoguing are very severe.”

John Brademas, a former Democratic congressman and trustee of a group called Religions for Peace, told the audience religious cooperation could build bridges.

“As people of faith, we want to advocate our respective governments, including the governments of Iran and the United States, to resolve their conflicts through dialogue.”

The previous day, Ahmadinejad had met rabbis from a fringe group of ultra-religious Jews who seek the dismantling of the state of Israel.

The rabbis from Neturei Karta International, or Jews United Against Zionism, had showered Ahmadinejad with praise and presented him with a gift of an ornate silver cup.

The church representatives at Thursday’s dinner were less friendly, taking the Iranian leader to task over his comments minimizing the Holocaust and urging him to tone down his rhetoric about Israel. Only a few dozen of the 200 or so at the dinner stood to applaud at the end of his speech, and many of them were from the Iranian mission.

Rohinton Dadina, a Zoroastrian priest who said a prayer at the dinner, said if Ahmadinejad’s views were changed even 1 percent by what he heard, it was worth holding such events.

“The main reason I wanted to come is I’m hoping that this event would have some influence on President Ahmadinejad in terms of him toning down his rhetoric, him looking towards peace,” Dadina told Reuters.

Earlier this week, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel urged the United Nations to indict Ahmadinejad for inciting genocide rather than allow him to speak at the U.N. General Assembly. His speech there on Tuesday was denounced by Western leaders, human rights groups and Jewish organizations as anti-Semitic.

Tell us what you think — should people of faith talk to Ahmadinejad? Or should the world shun him as an outcast? Is religion fomenting tension or can it help solve the problems between Iran and the United States?

PICTURE: REUTERS/Claudia Parsons and Lucas Jackson (Ahmadinejad greets religious leaders as he arrives at the dinner (top), listens as Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb speaks, and speaks at the U.N. General Assembly)

Egyptian cleric Yusef Al-Qaradawi has provoked a storm of criticism with comments this month attacking Shi’ites for alleged attempts to proselytize in Sunni Arab societies. It’s a debate which has been bubbling since 2003 when the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein — which the Sunni Arab governments didn’t like but know how to live with — was removed by the American-led invasion and ultimately replaced by a Shi’ite government reflecting the demographic superiority of Shi’ites in Iraq today.

Free to contact work with fellow Shi’ites in neighbouring Iran and develop links with the powerful Shi’ites of Lebanon and even with the more precariously-placed Shi’ites in the Gulf Arab coutnries, the rise of the Shi’ites in Iraq has been nothig less than a seismic shift in the region’s potical landscape. Numerous Arab leaders have shown their concern with comments suggesting a crescent of Shi’ite power was developing across the region from Lebanon to Iran (as Jordan’s King Abdullah has said) or that Arab Shi’ites real loyalties are to Iran (according to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak).

Qaradawi’s intervention is of equal import. He is one of the most influential of Sunni religious figures, a former Muslim Brotherhood sheikh in Egypt who settled in Qatar where Al-Jazeera television gave him a weekly television show. His opinions generally reflect the mainstream of Islamist thinking, veering neither into the rigid obsessions of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism nor appearing to compromise principles for the sake of a modernity that suits the West.

In an interview with the Egyptian paper Al-Masry Al-Youm (in Arabic) on Sept. 9, he was asked which was more worrisome, Wahhabism or Shi’ism. He offered a brief, yet tart, crticism of Saudi Islam, then launched into the “danger of Shi’ism” discourse, which has centred mainly on unsubstantiated claims of Shi’ism’s spread in Syria. “They are Muslims but they have innovated (new ideas into Islam) and their danger is their attempt to invade Sunni society, and they are ready for it since they have billions in wealth and cadres trained to proselytize Shi’ism in Sunni countries,” he said. “Unfortunately, I have recently found Egyptian Shi’ites. Ten years ago they wouldn’t have succeeded in getting one. … Now they are in the newspapers, on television and come out openly with their Shi’ite beliefs. Shi’ites hide their beliefs and that’s what we have to watch out for. We have to protect Sunni societies from the Shi’ite invasion.”

UPDATE: Here’s a Qaradawi interview in English on Shi’ites from Asharq Al-Alawsat.

Governments are worried about Shi’ism for political reasons, because Iran and Hizbollah are championing resistance to Western hegemony, while the Sunni Arab governments have been about accommodating Western power ever since Egypt signed the Camp David accords and since Saudi Arabia came into existence. Shi’ism has a certain revolutionary chic that is attractive to many Arabs today. Shi’ism’s central principle of venerating the family of the Prophet has an innocent-sounding air to most as well, although in points of theology it involves some radical breaks with Sunni thinking.

Saudi Shi’ite clerics were furious about Qaradawi’s comments since they instantly bring alive an argument they have been trying desperately to counter in order to ensure a better place for themselves as a persecuted minority in Saudi Arabia (here’s one cleric responding in Arabic on the Saudi Shi’ite website Rasid.com). Interestingly, though, Saudi media have for once been sympathetic to them, even highlighting Sheikh Hassan al-Saffar’s response on the front page of al-Watan on Saudi National Day, Sept. 23. “Saffar differs with Qaradawi and rejects criticising his status,” the headline read.

The Al-Riyadh newspaper carried a frontpage article apologising to Shi’ites for having publicising Qaradawi’s comments, which fly in the face of King Abdullah’s policy of promoting dialogue among Islamic sects and moderation. “Sectarian Islam, or the Islam of one faith?” al-Riyadh asked in a frontpage editorial on Sept. 24, also marking National Day.

One could not conclude, however, that the Saudi leadership is trying to distance itself from Sunni radicalism while Egypt encourages it. The calculations are too complicated. Saudi Arabia has led the regional mobilisation against Iran and Shi’ism of recent years, taking Egypt along with it. It has also sought to improve its Shi’ite minority’s status. Both are strategies that aim to secure the stability of the country from external enemies, like Iran, or friends, like the United States after 9/11, who occasionally entertain the idea of reordering the polities of the Arabian peninsula.